James Bond, the world’s most mythic spy in terms of glamour, sexual prowess, and most impressively, alcohol tolerance, is the subject of a depressing new study published in the *British Medical Journal’*s holiday issue. Meant as a tongue-in-cheek investigation into 007’s alcohol ingestion, the researchers went to exaggeratedly scientific lengths to determine what we’ve always known in the back of our minds but never wanted to speak out loud—that is, if James Bond was a real person, he would be a sad, martini-swilling alcoholic. As in, so consistently inebriated that he would not be able to make love to the myriad bikini-clad Bond girls. He would suffer mind-splitting hangovers that would prevent him from strangling the right assassin. He would have been more slurry than smooth. M would have staged an intervention for him. And don’t even get us started on the realistic paunch and jowls that he would’ve developed thanks to drunken food binges which no human being, not even Real Life James Bond, can resist.

The buzzkill researchers accumulated data from Ian Fleming’s dozen Bond novels, noting every time that alcohol was mentioned or implied, assigning different values to different drinks depending on the alcohol content. The conclusion, summarized by the Los Angeles Times:

Their findings showed that Bond was a major alcoholic, in a category of drinkers at highest risk of developing malignancies, depression, hypertension and cirrhosis. Despite his reputation as a womanizer, he likely would have suffered from sexual dysfunction.

And the reason he preferred his vodka martinis “shaken, not stirred,” contrary to proper mixology? He himself would have been unable to stir due to alcohol-induced tremors.

The scientists report that Bond consumed over four times the recommended amount of alcohol that is recommended for an adult male on a weekly basis, and that he hit the sauce hardest duringYou Only Live Twice. We’d say that Bond would be disgusted by this excessively uncool investigation into his crutch . . . but fortunately for him, scientists predict that he would have died from alcohol-related causes, like liver damage, by age 56. (Given that Fleming created him in 1953, he would have died in 2009, just long enough to see Daniel Craig appear as him, without the un-sexy alcohol tremors, in Quantum of Solace.)

Up next, scientists determine that Santa is a slovenly diabetic who could benefit from la nd surgery; and that Casablanca would not have been such a sexy romance if filmmakers had shown the oxygen tank Humphrey Bogart’s Rick would have realistically needed to drag around while dogging Ilsa.